ALL GONE WRONG: From the Eddy Curry (34) and Stephon Marbury (3) fiascos, to Isiah Thomas’ mistake-filled reign to the ungodly contract bestowed on Allan Houston (20) – which eventually forced Patrick Ewing out of town – the Knicks have done little to engender fan confidence. (
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Here is the Knicks’ biggest problem today, as the minutes officially melt away toward midnight, as the Jeremy Lin debate percolates, as their fans engage in the most spirited deliberation in the franchise’s history:

Those fans?

They don’t trust them.

They won’t believe them when they explain how letting Jeremy Lin walk was a basketball decision, pure and simple. Won’t believe there isn’t any of a dozen possible conspiracies at work here, that there’s an angry owner or a betrayed brass settling vendettas rather than thinking clearly and acting cleverly.

This isn’t a mistrust born this week, of course. This goes back to an old administration’s decision to trade Patrick Ewing rather than let his contract expire, which we know now was the iceberg looming in the dark horizon. This is Allan Houston’s six-year, $100 million contract that helped break the boat in two.

This is Isiah Thomas’ reign of error, and the Larry Brown fiasco, Stephon Marbury, and Eddy Curry, and two wasted years pining for LeBron James. Mostly, of course, this is a fundamental wariness that exists between Knicks fans and James Dolan, the owner who has overseen the franchise’s fall from a perennial playoff participant that once won at least one playoff series in nine straight seasons to one that has one playoff victory since 2001.

“If the people who run my basketball team told me the sky was blue,” a Knicks fan named Greg O’Malley emailed yesterday, “I wouldn’t believe them for a second. I hate that I feel that way. But I feel that way.”

The Knicks have themselves to blame for this, of course, thanks to a decade of mismanagement that wasn’t just bad, wasn’t just comically bad but was cynically bad. Dolan stubbornly retained Isiah as the face of his franchise, and that friendship still looms in the back of many Knicks fans’ minds, even as more stories emerge that they may not be BFFs any more. It seemed the day after the Knicks finally snuck over the .500 mark for the first time in a generation, they quintupled ticket prices.

Fans endure a lot. It’s what makes them fans.

It’s what also makes them skeptical.

Look: Maybe it’s possible that what we saw in the throes of Linsanity was the player Jeremy Lin is destined to be. Maybe he is a modern Cousy. Maybe the red flags — the poor defense, the inability to go left, the way every motivated opponent from Mario Chalmers to Deron Williams to Jason Kidd seemed to make him shrink, the fact that dozens, if not hundreds, of scouts and GMs and coaches were unanimously unimpressed with him — will disappear and the Lin we saw through all of February and part of March will be the Lin we see the rest of his career.

Or maybe he’s what sober voices kept insisting even as he was performing the basketball equivalent of the loaves and fishes last winter: a good player, very good as a ceiling. Serviceable, not a star. And the league will catch up to him eventually.

We don’t know. Nobody knows. That’s the biggest problem. The Knicks sure look like they’re willing to bet on the “pass” line, and if they were the Spurs or the Thunder, if they were run by the darlings of the basketball savants, there might be some shaken heads but few shaken fists. But the Knicks don’t have that kind of credibility.

Quick stat, food for thought: The one thing we can probably agree on is that Lin and Raymond Felton both enjoyed their basketball pinnacles, to date, in Mike D’Antoni’s offense. Under Mike Woodson, these were Lin’s averages last year: 28.0 minutes, 13.3 points, 5.4 assists, 43 percent shooting from the floor, 29 percent from 3.

These were Raymond Felton’s, in what everyone concedes was a poor season in Portland: 31 minutes, 11.4 points, 6.5 assists, 41 percent shooting, 31 percent from 3.

An NBA executive who doesn’t work for the Knicks urged me to look up those numbers. Maybe they tell you something, maybe they don’t. But here’s a promise: If the Knicks themselves asked you to look at them, you might wonder where the catch was. The Tappan Zee Bridge couldn’t span that credibility gap. And somewhere in the murky waters below rests the Knicks’ benefit of the doubt.